This has been easily one of my biggest risk-taking bouts, starting off by buying the first 2 Arcane spellbooks, a wand of stinking cloud, a stack of scrolls of teleport, and heading straight for the Anti-Melee Cave. Immensely risky, but the rewards were not long in coming, once I got sufficient levels to delve cautiously into the dragon caves and nail me some rich young and mature dragons.

Cloning Pits wasn't too bad at 3 hours, since I had Kusanagi-no-Tsurugi and Hagen (dual-wielded for stealth). The first enemy I killed in there was one of the It clones, and what else drops than a Katana (10d4). Well, swapping out Kusanagi and Hagen for the mighty Zantetsuken at close quarters reduced most of the rest of the competition to so much dogmeat.

I told myself to be patient, but to me almost the whole point of playing a tourist is to get the Old Castle reward, the legendary Platinum Yendorian Express Card. At 4 hours, I decided to attempt this beast, and you can bet it took some doing! When I engaged the first Greater Titan, I accidentally and stupidly forgot that I didn't have rConf covered without my ring of chaos, so I wasted a couple of my *Healing* pots to simply clear away the confusion after it had summoned me and beat me up. Then, of course, it summoned a nice host of monsters including Baphomet and a lesser black reaver. Suffice it to say that my rods of teleport other were the savior in this battle. And Baphomet, ouchie. After spending a single round in melee range with the towering Minotaur, Mr. YogaFlame decided it was what we might call a Bad Idea. YogaFlame re-engaged at range with the combo of Longbow of Bard and seeker arrows of hurt evil and did that make a dent in his hide! The lesser black reaver was a nuisance, taking my strength down to 18/68, but fortunately a potion lying handily on the ground took care of that later. Not long after, YogaFlame walked away up one shining, beautiful credit card.

Wish I could apply for one of those!

Back into the Dragon Caves shortly after that for some action, and I find an indestructible hard leather cap that turns out to be.........not Thranduil! It's INDRA! Bring on the Shambler, please, and sorry Great Storm Wyrms, your lives have just gotten a bit more complicated :D

On 26.1.2007 20:47 dzhang@its.caltech.edu wrote:Wow! 4:30 to clvl 38 with a Tourist! What did you use for damage output in Anti-melee Cave? A single Wand of Stinking Cloud was enough?

On 26.1.2007 21:09 dzhang@its.caltech.edu wrote:Whoa, 2 Staves of Power and 2 Wands of Rockets already? I'm missing out by not playing Lucky charcters!

On 26.1.2007 21:18 kingvictory2003@yahoo.com wrote:Hehe, actually the wand of stinking cloud was just to level up to about 10, and then the draconian's breath weapon was an expensive, albeit unlimited, source of half-assed damage. Enough so that I could kill black/blue/green mature dragons by around clvl 25. I actually focused on con as a maxxed stat at the beginning for this very purpose.